Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thrillers) Read online

  Other thrillers by Haggai Carmon in the Dan Gordon Intelligence Thriller® series:

  Triple Identity

  The Red Syndrome

  The Chameleon Conspiracy

  Triangle of Deception

  Visit www.sleepwithoneeyeopen.com

  www.dangordonspyclub.com

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 Haggai Carmon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Although this book was inspired by the author’s work for the US Department of Justice and other federal agencies in foreign intelligence gathering, it is not an autobiography, but rather a work of fiction. Apart from historical events, all names, characters, personal history, and events described in this book have never existed and are purely works of fiction.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477848432

  ISBN-10: 1477848436

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909774

  To my family

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1985 I received a recommendation to hire Haggai Carmon, a well-known and skillful Israeli attorney. At the time, as the director of the Office of Foreign Litigation in the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, I was responsible for the worldwide defense of lawsuits against the United States and for finding private lawyers to protect US interests.

  I had reason to be glad I picked Haggai. In our Israeli litigation he was hard to beat, winning all cases for the US government. From the beginning, Haggai and I developed a special relationship. As soon as a case was filed, he was full of ideas and ready to develop the best strategy in our defense. I quickly realized that Haggai had additional expertise in the intelligence-gathering field that would prove to be of great benefit to the US government.

  The money-laundering work I asked Haggai to do was new to me and I believe for the US government as well. And the scope of the work was indeed global in nature—we had reports of stolen funds in many different countries. He was given a relatively free rein to do his work with several general restrictions: 1) Don’t do anything to embarrass the US; and 2) Comply with the laws of the foreign country you are working in. I never heard complaints about Haggai’s work internationally, and I never had reason to doubt that he was operating within the law of the country where he was working. He was commended for his recovery efforts by a number of federal agencies, including the Postal Inspection Service and the IRS, and from a number of US Attorney’s offices throughout the country.

  Somewhere along the line, I realized that his investigations were providing great material for thriller espionage novels. I looked forward with great anticipation to reading every report he submitted to the office. You can see from his four novels how successfully he accomplished his work. To me, the best feature of his books is that you are reading true-to-life accounts written by a professional who knows how to give the reader a firsthand feeling and authentic description of how undercover agents do their work—and what is really happening behind the scenes.

  Haggai once told me that “white-collar criminals are different from robbers and burglars who want cash to hide their criminal behavior. White-collar criminals want their activity to look legal, so they leave a paper trail. Somewhere along that trail, they are bound to make a mistake, and I’ll be waiting there to catch them.” And we, the readers, are excited to learn about his latest adventures.

  David Epstein

  Washington, DC

  I

  December 2, 2006, Agarak, Armenia

  A chill mist blurred my view, mist with freezing showers. They obscured the figure approaching me from a hundred yards or so down the hill. He pushed through some thorny bushes and looked around. Nervously, I glanced at my wristwatch. It was nearly sundown, not that I could tell from the thick, leaden coating of sky.

  I was two miles from Agarak, a small town on the left bank of the Araks River, on the Armenian side of the border with Iran. More than misty weather blurred my vision. Blood oozed from the crease where a bullet had grazed my skull. Thick red drops mingled with the rain and dripped through my eyebrows. It burned my eyes when I wiped at it with my sleeve. Had I been a few inches taller than my six feet four inches, or had the bullet been a few inches lower, it would have gone right between my eyes.

  I waved my hand at the man. I even risked calling, “I’m here,” in his direction, but not too loudly—It’s an oxymoron, you moron, said the little devil inside me. Some people hear voices. Some see invisible people. Others have no imagination whatsoever. I hear a little devil. I’d survived the shooter’s first attempt, and I might not be as lucky the second time. But if I had to go, I was going take a few of them with me. I had the will, the anger, and enough ammunition to make it happen: I’d learned a thing or two in my three-year stint in the Israeli Mossad, and in Israel’s Special Forces before that.

  I wasn’t too concerned that my attackers would reemerge from wherever they were holed up. I knew they were waiting for me to move, and waiting to finish the job they were probably ordered to do: kill me and the man who came to meet me, never mind who dies first, as long as we both die today. Hey, hold your horses, ordered my inner devil, Who says both of you should die? Maybe the bullets were meant only for you? Consider your options.

  Maybe they would reemerge, maybe they wouldn’t. Should I retreat? Run away?

  Never.

  Not yours truly.

  As the man came closer, I could make out his thick mustache. He was limping on his left leg. I wondered if a bullet had gotten him, too. The CIA operational brief hadn’t mentioned any physical disability.

  He continued slowly but steadily toward me. He was in khaki military gear, black boots, and black-rimmed glasses. He looked younger than fifty-three, his listed age in the CIA fact sheet. Serving for almost twenty-five years in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had given him a soldier’s upright poise, even when he was on the run. He came closer, but so did a sudden, short barrage of bullets over my head, just when I thought that the pursuers had given up on us. I ducked, taking cover under the nearest scrubby bushes. The man couldn’t be more than fifty yards away.

  I gripped my Para Micro-Uzi submachine gun and looked around to identify the source of the fire. I knew I could return hellfire. This little toy, only 3.3 pounds and 19 inches long, was designed in Israel especially for counterterrorism activities. It could fire 1,250 rounds in one minute. However, the Micro-Uzi’s range effectiveness was only 100 feet. That meant that your target had to be close, very close. Oh, yes, you must also be brave, because at that range you still don’t know what kinds of weapons your enemy carries. While you must be less than 100 feet away to hit him, a gun with an
effective range of 300 feet can hit you. You’d be dead before your bullets got a third of the way toward your enemy, wasting their short lives for nothing.

  “This is Orange. I’ve just been under fire and took cover. I saw Tango about fifty yards away, but no contact yet,” I reported to the command post. My handheld device’s AES 256 key length encryption automatically scrambled all communications. NSA had approved that symmetric key cryptography for top-secret communication. Although I relied on it, as an added precaution I also used code words.

  “Report location,” came the response.

  How the fuck should I know? I was in a remote point on Earth, 6,000 feet or more above sea level, huddled on the ground with the Uzi in my left hand and the handheld in my right, barely hidden by a pair of scrubby bushes. The land was arid; it was now night, blade-cold, and—arid land or no—it was pouring rain. My GPS navigation gear had stopped working, probably because of the massive, sharp-edged mountain slopes around me, and any minute the barrage could start again. What else could go wrong?

  Sheltering my handheld GPS from the rain with my body, I tried to reactivate its personal locater beacon. The internal GPS receiver signal was, I hoped, reacquiring my position and transmitting it through the SARSAT satellites to HQ.

  The GPS stayed dead. Rain mixed with blood ran into my mouth, and I yielded to the whining question that my inner little devil kept asking: How did you get yourself into this mess? The truth was, I had to be there. Sense of mission and tenacity—those I had in spades.

  So, who the hell had been firing at us? The Armenians? Unlikely, because the shooting seemed to come from the Iranian side of the twisting river. If Iranian border patrol guards were shooting, there’d been a serious breach of security. However, without identifying the shooters, we wouldn’t know if Iranians were pursuing the man I had come to pick up. If they were, that was bad, bad news. It was bad, bad news as well if an Armenian border patrol was in fact shooting: whenever someone tries to cross the border, they shoot first and ask questions later. From my perspective, it didn’t really matter who was shooting—if they hit me, I was dead, regardless of their nationality.

  A cold breeze chilled my skin, but my blood was boiling with expectation and rage. In a few days, if all went well, I’d be back in a warm room sipping a hot drink, savoring the accomplished mission. That is, unless I was zipped up in a black body bag stretched on a metal slab in a coroner’s freezer. I hunched forward from underneath the bush to gain some visibility, and at least some view, in case Tango came closer.

  More than ten minutes of silence, and then—nothing. Tango should have reached me by now, and I’d lost sight of him. Where did he go? He was a trained soldier, I told myself. He knew how to camouflage himself, how to hide, and how to dodge between the bushes and boulders littering the slope. It was now completely dark. I was losing patience, and my feet and hands were turning to ice. How come the command post was in a heated apartment overlooking the painfully modest village square, while I was soaked with water and blood, freezing my ass off? Next time, you shouldn’t be the first to volunteer, or agree to be “volunteered,” I told myself. And my inner little devil, opening just one eye, added, Don’t whine. You were ordered to be on the forefront because you didn’t function well as a team member, remember?

  Of course I remembered. It had always been my problem, or maybe should I say my advantage. I can still remember Dr. Deborah Katzman, the fat Mossad psychologist, whose hairs on her upper lip made her look older than her real age of somewhere between fifty-five and sixty. She ran personality tests during my Israeli Mossad admission process. A few years later, when a careless Mossad human resources staffer left my file unattended, I’d had a chance to glance at her report. The doctor had suggested that the Mossad should give up on me.

  He’s too independent, tends to work alone, and challenges authority. Katzman was right, of course, but, lucky for me, the Mossad figured that those character traits would make me a better operative. Square-minded bureaucrats are a dime a dozen, but original thinkers with conniving minds and a bit of entrepreneurial flair are hard to find.

  The night stayed silent. I rose partway, crouching and peering around, searching the area for any movement that could mean either the man I had come to pick up, or my backup unit, but I couldn’t see any movement. He had to be near. I hoped he hadn’t taken a bullet, which would mean that all our efforts, in this joint CIA/Mossad operation over three continents and months of hard work, would be doomed. Visual was the only way to communicate with him. He wasn’t carrying any radio device, and unless he made it through and met us before our pursuers’ bullets met him, he was history. Well, either way he’d be history. Not just the idiom, the real fact.

  Historians would remember the defection of General Cyrus Madani, aka Tango, from the theocracy of Iran as the single most important event that helped derail the Iranians’ nuclear arms development program. Or at least to slow its completion substantially. So much work, so much sacrifice. He had to be close. Would it now be for nothing?

  “Change of plans,” I heard the voice in my earpiece. “Return to point Sabra immediately.” Good God, why? I wanted to ask, but contrary to my nature, I knew this was no time to question authority. Somebody else from my team would probably pick up General Madani if he’d made it through. We were not going to give up on him, not now.

  I backed slowly around bushes and boulders, giving a final look downhill for any sign of Madani. When I didn’t see him, and the gunfire didn’t resume, I stood upright, turned, and continued silently at a slow pace up the hill toward the village, my Uzi at the ready. It could fold to fit into a flat box no bigger than a hardcover book. But I wasn’t about to do that with the shooters perhaps still around. Whoever they were, they had tried to kill me or even Madani. That was enough to elevate them from “opposition” to “enemies,” and I don’t treat my enemies well. Especially when they fire first. And even when they are second to shoot.

  I finally reached the unpaved road and followed it to where a rental Nissan Pathfinder, picked up earlier at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, awaited me. The driver was a thuggish-looking, bearded agent with bulky pockets that barely hid his own Para Micro-Uzi. I jumped into the Nissan and he sped away.

  “Let me have that,” said Brad, pointing at my Uzi as he drove. “We might be stopped by a police roadblock.”

  I folded my Uzi and handed it to him. Driving sixty miles an hour, he steered with his left hand and used his right to lock the Uzi in a compartment between our seats, together with two PC9111 Professional handguns and one Glock 23 that he pulled from his right pants pockets.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked. There were seven of us in the team.

  “They’ll leave separately. We don’t want to draw too much attention.”

  “Why the hell was I told to leave Tango? He was less than fifty yards away,” I asked, barely masking my frustration. “Did someone else pick him up? Have you heard from him?”

  Brad turned his head toward me. “You’re bleeding,” he grunted, as if telling me I had something stuck in my teeth.

  “I know,” I said. “In our profession, the target remembers but the gun forgets. The bullet grazed me. Tell me why already.”

  “It was a trap. That was Eric’s conclusion, and he gave the order to cauterize the operation.”

  “A trap? You mean Tango wasn’t going to defect?” The thought of all our hard work going down the drain chilled me.

  “We don’t know, but the fact the opposition was waiting for us—and in fact from three different directions—told us it was a trap. All we knew was the direction from which Tango was to arrive. That tells us that something got botched. So Eric gave the order to pull you out.”

  “Three directions? Then they were aiming from behind his back?” I thought back, trying to remember exactly where the gunfire had come from.

  “Yes, but if they were in a lower altitude, and Tango was climbing toward you, they could shoot ab
ove his head and get you. It’s also possible that whoever the shooters were, they didn’t care if Tango was hit, too.”

  “Is the Agency giving up on him?” I tried to digest the news. All that time. All that work.

  “We don’t know,” Brad said, as he searched in the dark for the main road that avoided the village. “We also had a problem with Tango’s visual. The telephoto snapshot we took found some serious image discrepancies when our computer compared them to Tango’s photos taken in Iran.”

  I wiped my wet head with a tissue pulled from my pocket. The wound still hurt. So had Tango just been dangled by Iran? Had he been lying about his desire to defect?

  “Maybe there was a leak from our end, tipping off the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and that caused the case death?” I asked.

  Brad gave me a strange look. “Exactly. And if that leak came from us, maybe we have a mole?”

  There was something off about his tone. Did he mean me? What the hell? I leaned my head against the seat’s headrest. Keep your mouth shut, my little inner devil suggested. Ignore the provocation. “Whatever the case,” I said, “it’s bad.”

  Brad just nodded. We’d arrived at the airport. The sign said , ZVARTNOTS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. We met an Agency representative at the newly built modern arrivals hall. He got quickly into the Nissan, directed us to the parking lot, and surreptitiously transferred the arsenal from our car to his car’s trunk. Brad and I returned our SUV to the rental company and boarded an Armavia airline commercial flight to Moscow.

  After a stale five-dollar tea in a café at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, I boarded a Delta flight to New York. I had more questions than answers, but couldn’t decide what pissed me off most—that we’d come home empty handed; that I’d been a wet, cold, bleeding sitting duck on the Iranian-Armenian border for nothing; or my feeling that nobody was bothering to tell me what exactly was going on. Something wasn’t right. To quell my mounting suspicions, I slept most of the flight.